The present invention relates generally to electronic text messaging. More specifically, the present invention relates to universal address recognition for text-capable communication devices.
With the increasing globalization and convergence of telecommunications, communicating across different communication networks having different carriers to different types of communication devices is becoming increasingly more desirable. For example, several different types of communication devices exist that can receive text messages, such as text-capable wireless phones, personal computers operating various types of desktop applications and text-capable pagers. Typically, these different types of text-capable communication devices operate on some of the different networks having different carriers (i.e., different business entities that operate the different physical networks).
Several difficulties exist, however, in conveniently communicating with varied devices across such varied networks operated by varied carriers. For example, addressing standards do not exist for these different networks with their various carriers. In addition, different types of networks cannot be interconnected without using network gateways. For example, a Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) network cannot be connected to a time-division multiple access (TDMA) network without a network gateway. The presence of such a network gateway, however, typically requires routing information that cannot be easily obtained from, for example, a telephone number alone.
Moreover, a source party typically does not know much routing information beyond the telephone number. For example, to send a text-message to a text-capable mobile phone, many carrier operators require not only the telephone number for a given destination mobile phone, but also require a carrier identifier and/or network identifier for that mobile phone. Thus, a source party of a text message typically needs to know the telephone number of the mobile phone, the carrier identifier and/or network identifier for that phone, and possibly other types of information. Such information may not be readily available or even easily obtainable for a source party.
Thus, a need exists for providing universal recognition of destination addresses for a wide variety of text-capable communication devices.